Eligible state employees will be allowed to at least partially revert back to remote work under the terms of a new deal ironed out by the administration of Gov. Ned Lamont and a coalition of state employee unions, which sued the state last month over Lamont’s return-to-office mandate.
The agreement, made public Monday, provides for a 60-day “reset” period, during which employees can return to the schedule they followed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — including up to 100% telework — or continue with whatever model their department settled on after July 1, the date by which all state employees were supposed to return to their offices permanently.
After the 60 days — which run from Aug. 3 to Oct. 2 — workers will have to apply to work a certain number of their hours remotely. Requests of 50% or less of all scheduled hours will be granted, the governor’s office said; requests over that threshold will be subject to review by an employee’s supervisors and managers and weighed against their job responsibilities and their agency’s operational needs.
Individuals with a serious medical condition, or who have a family member with a serious medical condition, will be allowed to continue working entirely remotely through the end of the year.
The work-from-home provisions do not apply to “hazardous duty” employees, such as corrections officers, or others who must be at their work sites to perform their jobs.
The deal between Lamont and the unions will run through Dec. 31, after which a “final agreement” will be put in place. It is not clear what work-from-home allowances, if any, will ultimately be folded into that arrangement.
Lamont in May announced plans to bring all state employees back to their offices by July 1, citing Connecticut’s relatively high vaccination rate and a similar return-to-work movement among businesses in the private sector. A little more than a week after that order took effect, the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition filed a lawsuit in Superior Court, arguing that the governor could not recall workers without first consulting the unions.
In its filing, SEBAC said that telework options had made many employees more productive while cutting down on carbon emissions from motor vehicles.
